Often we’re asked about what are the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that we recommend.
That’s because search engines are a major source of traffic for most websites on the internet. Optimizing your website for search engines can help you rank higher in search results and significantly grow your business.
In this article, we will share the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use. Some of these tools offer similar functionalities, so we will also highlight which ones are the best for specific use-cases.
Things You Must Know About WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools
When reading SEO tips or searching for “best free WordPress SEO plugins”, you will come across articles that feature several dozen tools.
This can be quite overwhelming for beginners and non-techy users.
The truth is that you don’t need dozens of top SEO tools to get higher search rankings.
While most blog posts (including ours) will share the top most popular SEO plugins, it is extremely important for you to understand the use-cases of each tool.
For example, you never want to use more than one WordPress SEO plugin on your website. We will mention Yoast, All in One SEO, Rank Math, and SEOPress. You need to pick only one to avoid plugin conflict.
We’ll mention SEMRush, Ahrefs, and few other powerful tools, but you don’t need them all when you’re first starting out since they have similar feature set. We will share what tools we use in our business, and which features are the best among each tool.
With that said, let’s take a look at our expert pick of the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It offers a complete website optimization tool that helps you improve your website.
It lets you easily add SEO titles and descriptions to all posts and pages on your website. You can also use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your articles.
Yoast SEO automatically generates an XML sitemap for all your website content which makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website. It also helps you easily import your SEO data if you have been using another other SEO plugin.
For more details, see our complete guide on how to install and setup Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress.
We use Yoast SEO plugin on WPBeginner to help optimize our on-page SEO meta titles and descriptions, manage SEO redirects, control index settings, generate sitemap, etc.
However we don’t use all of Yoast SEO features such as content analysis because we feel it falls short when compared to a more comprehensive writing assistant solution like SEMRush.
This brings us to the next SEO tool in the list.
2. SEMRush
SEMRush is the best overall SEO tool on the market. Used by professional SEO experts, marketers, bloggers, and businesses of all sizes, it provides a comprehensive set of tools to grow your traffic.
You can use it to find organic keywords and search terms that you can easily rank for. It also allows you to do competitive research and see which keywords your competitors rank for, and how you can beat them.
SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant tool helps you improve your website content to beat the top 10 results for your focus keyword. It integrates with WordPress, and this will help you write more SEO friendly content.
To learn more, see our complete guide on how to do keyword research for your website.
3. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results.
It alerts you when Google is unable to crawl and index pages on your website. You also get helpful tips on how to fix those crawl errors.
Most importantly, it shows which keywords your website is ranking for, anchor texts, average position, impressions, and more. You can use this data to find keywords where you can easily rank higher by simply optimizing your content. You can also use this keyword data to come up with new blog post ideas.
For more details, see our comprehensive Google Search Console guide for beginners.
Yoast SEO comes with an easy integration that lets you setup Search Console without writing any code.
MonsterInsights, another tool we’ll mention later, helps you bring the Search Console reports right inside your WordPress dashboard for easy access.
4. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is a popular WordPress SEO plugin offering a comprehensive set of tools to improve your website. It allows you to easily add SEO title and meta tags, open graph meta tags, XML sitemaps, image sitemaps, and more.
It works out of box with WooCommerce to optimize your online store for SEO. It comes with easy setup and allows you to control access to different settings using a feature manager.
You may also want to see our complete beginner’s guide to All in One SEO Pack and our comparison of the Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.
All in One SEO Pack Pro plugin gives you access to more addons, and it is a more affordable solution than Yoast SEO which is why it’s the second most popular WordPress SEO plugin in the market.
Note: All in One SEO Pack is a Yoast SEO alternative. Remember, you only need one WordPress SEO plugin on your site.
5. Google Keyword Planner
No one on the planet has more insights into what people are searching for than the search giant Google.
Did you know that you can get your own keyword ideas from Google itself by using the Google Keyword Planner tool.
This free tool is offered to Google’s advertisers for free and anyone can use it. Its main purpose is to show advertisers the keywords they can bid on for their advertising campaigns.
It also helps advertisers choose the right keywords by showing them an estimate of search volume, number of results, and difficulty level.
As a content marketer or blogger, you can use this data to find keywords with high search volume, high advertiser interest, and more importantly keywords where you can easily outrank all other sites.
Bonus: See these 103 Blog Post Ideas that your Readers will Love (Cheat Sheet).
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool for marketers, bloggers, and businesses. It is a popular alternative to SEMRush and offers a lot of similar tools and features.
It allows you to do keyword research, competition analysis, backlink research, monitor keyword rankings, and more.
It also offers a detailed content analysis tool that helps you improve content while targeting specific keywords.
While there’s a huge feature overlap, what Ahrefs does really well is backlink analysis. We can use it to see which sites are linking to multiple competitors, but not us. This helps us get more backlinks and build more partnerships.
They also help us identify which content multiple of our competitors are ranking for that we aren’t, so we can create content on those subjects to get more exposure.
Last but not least, Ahrefs helps us better identify duplicate content and keyword cannibalization which helps us merge and upgrade the right content to boost our rankings.
For the reasons above, we pay for both SEMRush and Ahrefs because they’re both good for specific use-cases.
7. SEOPress
SEOPress is another simple yet powerful WordPress SEO plugin. It includes all the features you would expect from a SEO plugin like meta title, description, open graph support, image and content XML sitemaps, redirects, and more.
It comes with easier setup for beginners and advanced controls for more experienced users. It is comparable to all top WordPress SEO plugins on the market in terms of features and ease of use.
A big reason some users choose SEOPress over Yoast SEO is because the premium version is significantly cheaper and comes with a lot of the similar features.
Note: SEOPress is a Yoast SEO alternative. Remember, you only need one WordPress SEO plugin on your site.
8. Rank Math
Rank Math is a fast growing user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. It comes with a setup wizard and allows you to import data from other SEO plugins during the setup.
It allows you to easily add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts. The plugin also allows you to generate an XML sitemap, connect Google Search Console, and control access to plugin features based on user roles.
Note: Rank Math is a Yoast SEO alternative. Remember, you only need one WordPress SEO plugin on your site.
9. All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets allow you to make your website stand out in search results by showing star ratings below a review, prices below a product, image or video next to the description, and so on.
Search Engines use data available in Schema format to get this information. All in One Schema Rich Snippets helps you optimize your website by adding that Schema metadata to your website.
It supports reviews, events, people, products, recipes, software apps, videos, and articles as Schema content types. It works nicely alongside your existing WordPress SEO plugin.
10. KeywordTool.io
Keyword Tool is one of the best free keyword research tools available right now. It allows you to simply generate keyword ideas by typing in a keyword. These keyword suggestions are gathered from Google’s autosuggest feature. It also shows you keyword suggestions from Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and more.
These keyword suggestions are a treasure of information. You can also get search volume, cost per click, and other data for each keyword by upgrading to their paid plan.
11. Broken Link Checker
Broken links can affect your site’s SEO and create a bad experience for your users. If you have been running a blog for some time, then you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them.
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to find broken links on your WordPress site. You can then fix those links without even editing your posts. See our tutorial on how to fix broken links in WordPress with Broken Link Checker.
It is a highly useful plugin, and it’s totally free. The only downside is that it can become resource-intensive and may slow down your WordPress hosting server. Some hosting providers like WP Engine already block this plugin.
Because this plugin can slow down your site if you have a lot of content, we use Ahrefs tool for broken link detection because it helps us make sure our website is always fast.
Bonus: Redirection is a free plugin that helps you redirect broken links to an appropriate page on your website.
12. SEOquake
SEOquake is a useful SEO tool for website owners. It is available as a browser addon for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers.
It provides SEO related information for any website. This data includes page health, age, last updated, Alexa rank, and many other parameters. It is one of the most downloaded browser addons by SEO professionals.
Apart from that, the SEOquake toolbar can show you all the same data search results when you type in a keyword. This information can be extremely useful if you are gauging competition for different keywords. You can even download search results in CSV format and prepare your own excel sheets of search data.
Bonus Plugins for WordPress Website Owners
These tools give you additional advantage when optimizing your website for SEO. They do not advertise themselves as SEO tools but they are essential for every website and play a significant role in your website’s search performance.
13. WP Rocket
Site speed is a major factor in search rankings. That’s why you need to monitor your website speed & performance to make sure it’s not affecting your SEO.
The easiest way to boost your website speed is by enabling caching. WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market, which allows you to set up caching without diving into any technical stuff.
Alternative: WP Super Cache
14. MonsterInsights
Many beginners rely on their best guess to make their marketing decisions. You don’t need to do that when you can easily get the insights you need to improve your website’s SEO strategy.
MonsterInsights is the bets Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily install Google Analytics in WordPress and shows human-readable reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
It tells you where your users are coming from, your top content, what users do on your website, and more. It also allows you to track your WooCommerce SEO by seeing which products are popular and where you are losing customers.
Bonus tip: See what other marketing data you must track on your website to grow your business.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools for your website. You may also want to see our proven tips to easily increase your website traffic.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Thanks for sharing this useful article.
You’re welcome
THank you for the info shared
You’re welcome
Do you pay for Yoast Premium at WPBeginner? Or just the free version?
At the moment we are using the paid version of Yoast
so of all the SEO tools which do you recommend for a new blogger just starting
It would depend on what you are trying to do for which tool we would recommend
Thank you for these suggestions, will try to use these tools in the future.
You’re welcome, we hope you find our recommended tools helpful
In Yoast SEO plugin free version we can’t target multiple keywords for a single page is there any other way to target multiple keywords with in a single page.
Yoast’s free version only analyzes one keyword at a time so you can change your keyword for checking the optimizations they recommend for that keyword. Your post/page is not limited to one keyword with the free version.
Thanks so much
Pls how do I get traffic to world press site
For that question, you would want to take a look at our article here:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-increase-your-blog-traffic/
That’s a perfect list! Going to bookmark right now
Thank you, glad you like our recommendations
This article helped me to rank my blog
Glad our recommendations could help you rank
Thank you for sharing the valuable post for SEO. I’m following your great advice
You’re welcome, glad you found our guide helpful
Thank you very much for this helpful post!
You’re welcome
This post is so deceiving – most of these aren’t even WordPress plugins.
We apologize if there was confusion, the post is for plugins and tools not only plugins
i love this post article were nice and they have help me alot in buliding my blog. But i got one question which is ,how can i get real orgainic traffic for my blog
For increasing your site’s traffic, you would want to take a look at our guide here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-increase-your-blog-traffic/
Your site has been a real help for me since I started my sites.
Among my Google searches for anything to do with WordPress, a click on your site is MUST. You have All-in-One pack especially for WordPress users.
Your are simply superb!
Cheers!
Glad our site has been helpful to you
Yoast Seo is a sensational SEO optimization plugin. Over the past 4 years, it has taken on the All In One Seo Pack. However, there are some elements that Yoast Seo, although it is more specific, does not have all the skills of All in One Seo Pack. It overcomes Yoast with Open Graph Meta and Bat Bot Blocker (quite useful SEO optimization).
From the theme of my blog to my first post i was always visiting your site and i always have a reason to check back. You are doing great job. Please are there any negative sides to the Rel No Follow plugin?
Hi Sorison,
Thanks for the feedback, we are glad you find WPBeginner helpful. There are no negative impact of the Rel no Follow plugin. You just need to make sure that you only nofollow links to external sites and not your own.
Hey! Is the No Follow plugin still relevant? I read that the “juice” is “evaporated” so you still lose the juice when external linking, but it goes nowhere.
Hi Richard,
Yes it is still relevant.
Thank you for making this list, I have gathered so much information and pointing the best plugins from this article. This is awesome!
Are all these to be used together? They all communicate together?
Hi Phillip,
No these are different tools and each one of them does different things.
Sir, can google AdWord’s free keyword research tool be used completely over Semrush or other paid keyword research tool to make a WordPress website completely seo freindly? I asked this question because at present I could’nt afford the price of semrush or other paid premium services.
how about ALL in ONe SEO ?
It is a great plugin and you can use it. Please check out our comparison of Yoast SEO vs All In One SEO Pack.
Great! I installed all of these on my wordpress site.
Thanks for the info
nice information any special security blog that help and protect site from attackers ?
Grate Post Really Awesome
Hello,
Thank you for sharing this awesome collection of SEO WordPress plugins.
Yoast SEO is one of my favorite plugin. It helps you to optimize your meta tags without entering into coding. I use this plugin in my website.
I use it in my blog website.
Keep updating!!!
Decent list, but I came here by searching for some plugin I just saw in a YouTube video called “Easy SEO WP”. This is what it looks like (SS from part of vid)
Video is from 2014. Does this plugin exist? Anyone have a link to it?
I took a WAG and deleted the 404 log since I was fairly confident that the real urls needing redirecting had been done. I find this plugin confusing and it’s possibly because I don’t have a deep understanding yet of the entire process.
I use Analytics, GTMetrix, Screaming Frog, Yoast SEO plugin and other reliable programs to test various aspects of my site. While I certainly want and need to make sure any incorrect urls are redirected, I certainly don’t want to redirect unnecessarily.
Do you have any thoughts and/or suggestions about this?
Also, since Broken Link Checker seems to be a resource guzzler, can it be used on a periodic basis to check links vs. being activated full-time?
Thanks so much for your assistance.
Yes you can use Broken Link Checker periodically. For redirects, if you are not seeing any 404 errors that you would like to redirect, then there is no need to setup unnecessary redirects.
Your SEO plugins are really very well done and thus i got more interesting information it is very well nice and awesome.
That’s great post….
What are your thoughts on all in one SEO?
Please see our comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.
If you are talking about plugins then Yoast is my first choice. And when it comes to tools, each tool mention here has their own advantages.
I would like to use Yoast SEO for my wordpress site. I think this is the best wordpress plugin.
Great Post.
Hey,
Could you recommend me a tool that has real updates on the regular basis? Lots of services just CLAIM to have that, but if you check yourself, many of them (SEMrush, for example) received last update of their bases in Dec, 2015! I KNOW, RIGHT!
I’ve used Serstat for some time. So far so good. But I quess they should put more effort as their share on the market is raletively low.
Hello Admin, Are you using PRO version of Yoast SEO Plugin For Adding multiple Meta Keywords In your Posts.
I read this article couple of months ago and followed most of these plugins & tools.
After recent WP update, i found that “8. Rel NoFollow Checkbox” is not working properly.
Is there any good alternative of this plugin except “making all external link noFollow”?
Hello,
Thanks for the awesome article about tools that help bloggers optimise their blogs and website. I have a question, can these tools be used to help a free wordpress.com blog/website?
I just started blogging about a month ago, and I would like to see the number of visitors of my blog increase but I am having trouble doing so, not sure if it’s because I have a free wordpress.com blog.
Thanks for the help!
Some of them can but some of them are WordPress plugins and cannot be used on WordPress.com. Please see our guide on the difference between self hosted WordPress.org vs free WordPress.com blog.
hello
thx for good guide
i work in a travel agency
for making better that in seo i need to use the best one , would you please guide me?
i dont know yoast,premium seo pack, all in one or other?
thx
Start by setting up Yoast SEO on your website.
thanks admin for great information about SEO plugin
Well, thanks very much for insightful post. Would it be wise if I use more than one of these plugins on my WordPress site?
can these tools be helpful with arabic websites ?
Keyword Tool as mentioned in your post is no longer free.
For me, SEMRush and Google Keyword Planner are doing most of the work. At least when we talk about tools from this list. Thanks for the post!
this post is important for new blogger which is new in blogging Market..This plugin help for seo for google and analysis of post..
I have been with Yoast SEO for years but recently I found problems on indexing at google webmaster. I have tried to resolve this but no avail.
With the changes of new template and new version WP, I also update the plugin to a new one. But alas, all my meta descriptions were washed away within weeks due to changes on robot.txt.
I changed to allinoneSEO and all chamged the robot.txt with its default. Within 3-4 days everything went normal again and even data in google webmaster also looks good, where all my pages are indexed well.
Despite Yoast full of bell and whistles, I will stay with allinoneSEO plugin for all my webs…
Yoast SEO is now pushing something called OnPage. In your SEO checks it states that your site is not indexing and then leads you to OnPage to fix it. The OnPage requires you to sign up with an account to “Fix” the problem that never existed to begin with.
I turned off Yoast SEO on my sites. I no longer have this issue.
Great post and very insightful. I use Yoast on my website, and besides Google, I haven’t used any of the rest.
Another great informative post…thank you.
I updated the new yoast seo, I saw that the xml site map was changed, I updated them and found all my google ranking for many posts were lost, will I get them back
Can all these plugins be used at a time?
Yes.
Thank you once again for all your wonderful helpful posts.
I have a question which nobody seems to be able to answer…have asked many times in forum for help but nothing works…I am completely locked out of 2 of my sites, they show a 404 nothing found page…but it’s the admin that I cannot get into.
Can anyone please help?
Thanks in advance.
Please see what to do when you are locked out of WordPress admin area